Friends say MSU freshman found dead wasn't reckless

Aug. 25, 2014

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Song Zhao was on a plane from Beijing to Washington, D.C. for a lot of Sunday. She didn’t get the news until she landed and turned her phone back on.

Jiayi Dai was dead, Jiayi who was like her little sister in America.

“I don’t believe that Jiayi is that kind of girl that she drinks that much that it leads direct to her death,” Song said.

Dai was 19 years old. She had been in East Lansing just over a week, long enough to go through international student orientation. She never made it to the start of her freshman year.

She died on Saturday morning. She had spent the night at an apartment in the 300 block of Pin Oak Lane. When other people in the apartment woke up, they found her unresponsive. Police believe alcohol may have played a role in her death.

It wasn’t like her. That’s what friends and classmates said. They described a young woman who was kind and fun and serious about her future. Dai was planning to study business, human resources. She made friends easily. She wasn’t reckless.

“We were really close.”

Song last saw her on May 26th, Dai’s birthday. They had been friends for nearly two years. Dai did her last two years of high school in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Arlington, Va. Song is a student at American University in the city itself. The two women both come from the port city of Qingdao.

“She had a lot of friends,” Song said. “She loved to make friends. She’s a really easy going and fun girl. She’s just lovely….”

Her voice tapered off.

“I can’t believe that happened to her.”

East Lansing Police Captain Jeff Murphy knows more than most about what happened on the night before Dai’s death.

“But we can’t talk about all of that,” he said, “because (the investigation) is still open and active.”

Police have seen no signs of foul play, he said, but it’s not impossible that someone could face charges for providing Dai with alcohol. She was, after all, underage.

And that’s presuming that alcohol was, indeed, the cause. The toxicology reports will take another six weeks, Murphy said.

The last MSU student to die of an alcohol overdose was Olivia Pryor, a freshman from Roseville who was found dead in her dorm room in March of 2012.

But Murphy said the potential for something tragic seldom seems far away. It’s not unusual for East Lansing police to encounter young people so incapacitated by alcohol that they have to be taken to a hospital. On some nights, it happens multiple times, “and those are just people that we find out in public.”

“If you’re with somebody who is so intoxicated that you feel their life is in danger because they can’t take care of themselves and can’t call for help, you need to do just what our officers do,” he said. “See that they get help one way or another.”

International students at MSU don’t drink as much as their American classmates. The university surveyed students last year, asking among other things how much they drank the last time they “partied.” Overall, students who drank said they had just over five drinks on average. International students reported less than four drinks.

Peter Briggs, director of the university’s Office for International Students and Scholars, said on Sunday that the university explains Michigan’s drinking laws to international student during orientation. It doesn’t spent a lot of time on how to find help for someone who is dangerously drunk.

Candace Anderson has a hard time imagining Dai that way.

She remembers the girl who arrived at Concordia Academy, a Lutheran school outside of Minneapolis, in the fall of 2011. The girl whose shyness melted away as the year went on, whose uncertain English got steadily better, whose faith blossomed in a religious environment.

“After chapel, we would always have discussions of what we took from it, how we would put that into our lives, and you could see her living it out,” said Anderson. She was one of Dai’s friends. “She would get out her Bible when she wasn’t doing anything and start reading it. She would pray with us.”

At the goodbye party when Dai left Concordia in 2012, friends wrote out Bible verses for her to take along, verses she promised to read. Anderson chose Matthew 28:19, which begins, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations...”

MSU has not planned any sort of memorial for Dai. Her roommates and friends have been offered counseling, a university spokesman said.

But someone who knows and loves her will be here soon. On Monday, Song said, Dai’s mother boarded a plane for Michigan.